Letter to the Sports Editor…The President must rid Guyana of cricket cartel

Jun 11, 2014 Sports

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Dear Editor,
I have read with some interest the flood of letters and comments published over the last few days in your newspapers, ranging from one writer calling himself the Onlooker, Peeping Tom, Nigel Jason and Ramesh Takur. While I hold no brief for the APNU or the Government or the 90% of people they represent in Guyana, permit me to make a few observations in response to some of the inaccuracies contained therein. Having now better reviewed the Bill, in summary it is quite clear the Bill seeks to regularize the issue of phantom clubs, find ‘stolen’ assets, provide economic viability to cricket in Guyana and limit government’s involvement.
Phantom Clubs
One of the major problems with Guyana’s cricket is the issue of phantom clubs, something which the new Constitution of the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) will address. Like the problems some countries have had, for instance Guyana, with the Official List of Electors (Voters list) for National Elections, it is the clubs of a country who are considered the voters lists used to determine who represents the electorate on various Boards, such as Association Boards, County boards and National Boards, like the GCB.
However, what has been happening in some of the current County and Association Boards, phantom clubs have propped up, giving some Associations and County boards extra votes which are proportionally attributed for voting at the GCB level. So for instance in areas such as East Bank Demerara and West Coast Demerara where very little cricket is played and very few clubs are in existence, the number of clubs listed remain questionable, leading these Association Boards to ‘phantomize’ their numbers to gain extra votes and capture their various associations, county boards (such as the Demerara Board which has a similar dispute) and the Guyana Cricket Board. The new constitution which the WICB and the GCB are fighting tooth and nail to avoid, definitively declares war on phantom clubs, thereby eliminating the chances of skullduggery, which could see the Lieutenants who have managed to currently capture the GCB, lose their stranglehold on Guyana’s cricket and avoid the cartel-like force to destroy the GCB.
‘Stolen’ Assets
Another misconception bandied about with regard to this Bill, is the issue of the missing assets. One would recall from the media, during the time of the IMC, one lieutenant, a senior member of the GCB along with others, constituted a private company, named DEB, to strip GCB assets and co-opt them in this private company to goodness knows do what with them! So any possible requisitioning of assets by way of the Guyana Cricket Administration Bill would be to basically carry out a search and rescue operation aimed at restoring the cricket assets of this country into a transparent and accountable body, given that most if not all the assets are now ‘missing’ and wrapped up in a private company. If it is true that one WICB Director is part owner of the DEB Company, can you imagine the far reaching consequences of corruption in the WICB in the Caribbean? The assets issue in the bill therefore is no longer a moot point!
Government’s role
Much has also been tossed around about government’s role in the cricketing operations at the country level, via this Bill. In fact the WICB has touted governments’ intervention in the GCB as its key pillar for rejecting the normalization and regularization of cricket in Guyana. The WICB gets by with its propaganda owing to skillful use of the media, artful deception, and the use of a now outdated, June 2011, International Cricket Council (ICC) directive, that “ the ICC has given its member boards two years to become democratized and free from government and political interference in a bid to improve governance within the game”. The WICB has attempted to wave this wand to captivate anti-government sentiment across the region with the hope of gaining mileage and incremental leverage on the business of cricket in the Caribbean through its syndicated operation.
However, what the WICB has poisonously hidden from the limelight and the public domain is even before expiration of the timeline for compliance, at its subsequent Annual Conference in November 2012, the ICC publicly indicated that it was reviewing its stance against government involvement in the administration of cricket of its Members. While acknowledging that “removal of government interference had been one of the Woolf report recommendations approved by the ICC”, ICC president Alan Isaac, said it had recognized the role governments played in developing cricket in several countries and is rethinking its position. Isaac is quoted as saying, “In the ICC (June 2011) annual conference, we made some changes and introduced some onerous penalties if they [issues related to government interference] are not complied with,” Isaac said in Dhaka. “In the last meeting (November 2012), we discussed the issues and the realities we need to reflect on are perhaps the draconian nature of some of those requirements. In this part of the world and lots of other countries, quite honestly, cricket and other sports depend on the government. We are having a little bit of post-change review.” The world governing council, none less than the ICC, has duly discredited the WICB/GCB/lieutenants fallacious arguments.
Wither the CARICOM Competition Commission
What however remains controversial is how could individuals of an association, such as the GCB in CARICOM be allowed to commandeer the assets its organization, and without impunity? It is understood that one of the owners of DEB is in fact a Director of the WICB! Given that the WICB, as a privately registered company residing in Antigua, has effectively issued shares to the GCB, making the GCB part of its syndicate-like arrangement, now runs amok in CARICOM through this diabolical plot of asset transfer, adding to a range of questionable dealings, it is unimaginable that the CARICOM Competition Commission (CCC), based in Suriname has sat idly by, with all of its investigative powers, without even conducting a cursory inquiry into the operational mechanisms of this anti-competitive company.
Absence of cricket
What many of the GCB and WICB lieutenants have also avoided to mention is that less international cricket has been played in Guyana ever since the current GCB executives took over the managing of cricket in Guyana a few years ago, indicative of cricket being played on the West Bank, East Bank and West Coast of Demerara and Essequibo, where the large crop of current GCB administrators represent. Guyana last held a Test match in 2011, a remarkable achievement for persons in the GCB wanting to hold power just for the sake of doing so, to derive all the economic benefit for them and develop the longer format of the game in Guyana. Regional matches, whenever they are played in Guyana suffer from record worst attendances, lowest attendances in the history of cricket in Guyana. The last 4-day game in Guyana saw no more than 100 persons attending each day. Cricket died the day the current executives set foot in the GCB.
Sketchy business deals
It is clear the vested interest of running cricket is to benefit a few. The Pegasus Hotel benefits from the lion’s share of accommodation each time cricket is held in Guyana, as admitted by its CEO in your Sunday 8 June 2014 edition. With the limited staff at the cricket board’s Headquarters in Regent Street, it is easy to conclude that multiple private contracts are handed out for such services, without public tendering and one can only assume what happens to some of the other services, such as the provision of transportation, manning of the entrances to the stadium, security, provision of meals, arranging VIP privileges, among other logistical arrangements.
Enact the Bill
From the analysis above, one can easily concluded that none of the current lieutenants of the GCB seem interested in preserving cricket or developing the game but only in protecting their incestuous business deals. The President needs to therefore urgently assent this bill into law, and carry out the statutes stipulated therein, one of which includes the joint appointment (both the Minister and the WICB!) of an ombudsman to carry out the election process. Organizations and individuals who remain staunchly opposed to this process are clearly pursuing personal agendas of power and corruption. AND SO THE PRESIDENT MUST RID GUYANA OF THE CRICKET CARTEL
Jewan Persaud
Manager of the East Coast Jaguars

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